As 2022 comes to a close, many are wondering whether businesses will continue investing in technology amid concerns about the global economy. To find out the answer, IBM partnered with Morning Consult on a survey of 4,000 global business leaders about their 2023 investment plans.

“The survey offers important insights into how business leaders plan to allocate resources at a time when many are battening down the hatches for a challenging year to come,” said IBM Chief Information Officer Kathryn Guarini.

Below are five key findings:

1. Technology spending is not going to slow down.

Despite a forecasted leaner year and potential global recession, the survey found that businesses are continuing to invest in technology because it has become an essential engine for growth and scale, as well as a crucial source of competitive advantage.

The lessons from the pandemic are clear: Technology will continue as a beacon to help businesses better connect with customers.

And so rather than cutting down on spending, businesses are investing in technology to drive business value and transform the way clients and industries operate.

2. Cybersecurity and supply chain risks are driving demand.

Cyber risks are the biggest drivers as well as the largest hindrance to tech investments. During the pandemic, after speeding the adoption of new tech and tools to support a remote workforce, corporations suffered a higher frequency of business-impacting cyberattacks. That led the cost of the average data breach to reach an all-time high of $4.35 million.

With that looming threat, it’s not surprising that cyber risks are both the biggest driver and the largest hinderance to tech investment.

Similarly, supply chain issues are driving technology adoption with software now being deployed to reduce waste, lower cost and improve environmental circularity.

3. Companies are planning investments across key areas of their tech portfolio.

Digital leaders believe an investment in technology⁠—whether that’s around cybersecurity, AI, hybrid cloud or green IT⁠—will help their organizations deal with what’s already a hugely challenging business environment. And, importantly, AI and cloud are the top technologies businesses believe will drive profits.

Heading into 2023, technology buyers have clear directives and holistic plans to invest in infrastructure, build AI services on top of that infrastructure for a better employee and customer experience, secure their entire digital ecosystem, and make their entire business more sustainable and resilient.

4. Companies are prioritizing spending on ESG and sustainability technology.

Organizations are under mounting pressure to progress toward more sustainable and socially responsible business operations⁠—and to demonstrate these measures in a robust and verifiable way.

To that end, prioritizing spending on environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives and sustainability tech is a wise investment that will help streamline operations and make companies more responsible and profitable in the long term.

Remember, ESG is more than just good intentions. It’s about creating a tangible, practical plan that achieves real results.

5. Emerging AI technologies will continue generating excitement.

Looking ahead, survey respondents specifically cited digital employees (35%) and generative AI (35%) as the top emerging technologies that will change their businesses the most in the next three to five years.

Digital employees can help augment how business workers manage their day-to-day work. These AI-powered assistants can help improve the productivity of employees, doing everything from human resource tasks like job changes and department transfers, to finance and automating invoice processing, and speeding up IT support.

While office life is set for an upgrade, AI is as well. Investments in generative AI, and the foundation models that underpin it, will revolutionize how AI models are built and produce outputs.

Review the deeper details of the full survey at IBM at the below link:

https://w3.ibm.com/w3publisher/all-in-on-hybrid-cloud/trending-topics/2023-predictions

Series: 2022 Cost of a Data Breach Report

According to John Zorabedian the average cost of a data breach reached an all-time high of $4.35 million this year. The newly published 2022 Cost of a Data Breach Report, highlights an increase of 2.6% from a year ago and 12.7% since 2020.

New research in this year’s report also reveals for the first time that 83% of organizations in the study have experienced more than one data breach and just 17% said this was their first data breach. And at a time when inflation is growing, breached businesses have passed higher costs to customers, with 60% of organizations in the study reporting that they increased the price of goods and services in response to losses from the breach.

These are among the dozens of findings from the study of 550 organizations across a variety of industries and geographies that experienced a data breach between March 2021 and March 2022. Now in its 17th year, with research independently conducted by Ponemon Institute, and featuring analysis by IBM Security, the Cost of a Data Breach Report is among the leading benchmark reports in the security industry. It offers IT, security and business leaders a lens into risk factors that can increase the costs associated with a data breach, and which security practices and technologies can help mitigate security risk and financial damages.

Top Findings in the 2022 Report

The use of security AI and automation has jumped by nearly one-fifth since 2020, and cost savings from security AI and automation were the highest of any factor studied.

The percentage of organizations with security AI and automation deployed grew from 59% in 2020 to 70% in 2022, an 18.6% growth rate. Those organizations that reported their security AI and automation technologies are “fully deployed” — 31% of organizations — experienced breach costs that were $3.05 million less than at organizations with no security AI and automation. Data breaches at organizations with no security AI and automation deployed cost an average $6.2 million, compared to an average $3.15 million at organizations where security AI and automation was fully deployed.

The ROI from security AI and automation is apparent from another metric, that of time. Security AI and automation not only reduced costs, but they also significantly lowered the time to identify and contain a data breach (i.e., the breach lifecycle). With those technologies fully deployed, the average lifecycle of a data breach was 74 days shorter than the average for no security AI and automation.

IBM provides SOAR solutions to help businesses accelerate incident response with automation, process standardization and integration with businesses’ existing security tools. These capabilities enable a more dynamic response, providing security teams with intelligence to adapt and guidance to resolve incidents with agility and speed.

Healthcare breach costs surged to $10.1 million, the highest average cost of any industry for 12th year in a row.

While healthcare costs in the U.S. have seen increases between 6% and 7% since 2020, according to PwC, data breach costs in the industry have far outpaced overall healthcare inflation in the same time period. Healthcare industry breach costs surged 42%, growing from $7.13 million in 2020 to $10.10 million in 2022. Healthcare has been the highest cost industry for 12 years in a row.

More organizations deploy zero trust in 2022 than they did in 2021, with cost savings of about $1 million.

This was the second year that the report looked at the impact of a zero trust security framework on the average cost of a data breach. The share of organizations deploying a zero trust architecture grew from 35% in 2021 to 41% in 2022. The other 59% percent of organizations studied in the 2022 report who do not deploy zero trust incurred an average of $1 million in greater breach costs compared to those that do deploy zero trust. However, the cost savings were even greater for those with a mature zero trust deployment — about $1.5 million lower compared to organizations at the initial stages of a zero trust program.

Ransomware and destructive attacks were more expensive than the average breach in 2022, while the share of breaches involving ransomware grew by 41%.

Last year was the first year that the report looked at the cost of ransomware and destructive attacks. The average cost of a ransomware attack — not including the cost of the ransom — went down slightly in 2022, from $4.62 million to $4.54 million, while destructive attacks increased in cost from $4.69 million to $5.12 million, compared to the global average of $4.35 million. The share of breaches caused by ransomware grew from 7.8% in 2021 to 11% in 2022, a growth rate of 41%.

The impact of incident response teams and regularly tested incident response plans on cost was $2.66 million in average savings.

Forming an incident response (IR) team and extensive testing of the IR plan were two of the most effective ways to mitigate the cost of a data breach. However, of studied businesses that have IR plans (73%), 37% don’t test their plan regularly. It’s essential that businesses routinely test their IR plans through tabletop exercises or run a breach scenario in a simulated environment, such as a cyber range.Read the Report

What’s New in the 2022 Report

The 2022 study broke new ground in research with some fresh findings showing how the cost of a breach was affected by factors including supply chain compromises, critical infrastructure, and the skills gap. The study also explored how security technologies, including extended detection and response (XDR) and cloud security, impacted breach costs. Below are some of these findings.

$4.82 million was the average cost of a critical infrastructure data breach.

The average cost of a data breach for critical infrastructure organizations studied was $4.82 million — $1 million more than the average cost for organizations in other industries. Critical infrastructure organizations included those in the financial services, industrial, technology, energy, transportation, communication, healthcare, education, and public sector industries. Twenty-eight percent of critical infrastructure organizations experienced a destructive or ransomware attack, while 17% experienced a breach because of a business partner being compromised.

45% of breaches occurred in the cloud, but breaches cost less in hybrid cloud environments.

Forty-five percent of breaches in the study occurred in the cloud. Breaches that happened in a hybrid cloud environment cost an average of $3.80 million, compared to $4.24 million for breaches in private clouds and $5.02 million for breaches in public clouds. Organizations with a hybrid cloud model also had shorter breach lifecycles than organizations that solely adopt a public or private cloud model. It took 48 fewer days for hybrid cloud adopters to identify and contain a breach, compared to public cloud adopters.

XDR technologies helped reduce breach lifecycles by almost a month.

Those 44% of organizations with XDR technologies saw considerable advantages in response times. Organizations with XDR deployed had a data breach lifecycle that was on average 29 days shorter compared to organizations that didn’t implement XDR.

XDR capabilities can help significantly reduce average data breach costs and breach lifecycles. For example, IBM Security QRadar XDR enabled businesses to detect and eliminate threats faster by leveraging its single unified workflow across tools.

The skills gap cost organizations more than half a million dollars in data breach costs.

Just 38% of organizations in the study said their security team was sufficiently staffed. This skills gap was associated with data breach costs that were $550,000 higher for understaffed organizations than for those with sufficiently staffed security teams.

Nearly one-fifth of breaches were caused by a supply chain compromise, which cost more and took nearly a month longer to contain.

A number of major attacks in recent years have reached organizations through the supply chain, such as organizations being breached due to the compromise of a business partner or supplier. In 2022, 19% of breaches were supply chain attacks, at an average cost of $4.46 million, slightly higher than the global average. Supply chain compromises had an average lifecycle that was 26 days longer than the global average lifecycle.

More to Explore

The Cost of a Data Breach Report contains a wealth of information that can help organizations understand potential financial risks and benchmark costs based on a variety of factors. Plus, the report includes recommendations for security best practices based on IBM Security’s analysis of the research.

There’s more to explore in the full report, including:

• Global findings — the average cost of a data breach in 17 different geographies and 17 industries, including the top country (United States — $9.44 million).
• Impact of incident response teams and regularly tested incident response plans on cost ($2.66 million in average savings).
• Frequency and average cost of the most common attack vectors causing the breaches, including stolen credentials (19%, $4.5 million), phishing (16%, $4.91 million) and cloud misconfiguration (15%, $4.14 million).
• Effects of security measures and technologies, including risk quantification techniques, identity and access management, multi-factor authentication and crisis management teams.
• Impacts of security vulnerabilities, including security system complexity, attacks in the midst of cloud migration, remote work and compliance failures.
• Cost of mega breaches of over 1 million records, including the largest breaches of up to 60 million records that cost nearly $400 million.

Register to download a PDF of the complete report.

Register for a webinar with IBM Security experts discussing key findings and best practices.

Leveraging IBM Security X-Force’s global presence and in-depth analysis of cloud-related cybersecurity incidents IBM has responded to over the past year, this report was created to aid clients and the broader community with their cloud security strategy.

• Discover the latest threat intelligence and trends in cloud security: What makes cloud infrastructure vulnerable to threats?
• Understand why cybercrime groups are targeting the cloud.
• Learn how to enhance your security posture using insights from IBM Security X-Force.

REGISTER HERE:

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Apr 13, 2022

According to Martin Armstrong at Statista, Consumer prices in the United States continued to rise in February and March of 2022 after inflation had hit a 40-year high in January. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) was up 8.5 percent compared to a year ago, while the core index excluding more volatile food and energy prices increased 6.5 percent over the last 12 months. The March reading was the highest since December 1981, fueling fears that inflation is out of control.

When inflation spiked in the spring/early summer of 2021, it was largely due to the so-called base effect, reversing the pandemic’s cooling effect on consumer prices a year earlier. At the onset of the pandemic, prices had taken a dive due to a sudden drop in consumer spending and fuel demand before slowly climbing back to their pre-pandemic trajectory over the summer and fall. Due to that initial dip in consumer prices, year-over-year comparisons were always going to be exaggerated for a while, but that is no longer the case.

Back in April 2021, the Federal Open Market Committee said that it was going to aim for “inflation moderately above 2 percent for some time” before raising interest rates to achieve a long-term average of 2 percent inflation. And while it remained unclear how the committee defines “moderately above” and “for some time”, it’s increasingly clear that the 2-percent goal is in danger.

To eliminate the short-term effects of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we calculated the average annual inflation rate over a moving three-year period, yielding a curve that fluctuated around 2 percent for a long time, until it took off last summer. In March, the three-year average inflation rate climbed to 4.2 percent, clearly indicating that the latest spike in consumer prices is more than just a statistical blip and should be taken seriously.

Description

This chart shows the year-over-year change of the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers in the U.S.

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Consumer Price Index

Felix Richter reported Consumer prices in the United States continued to rise in November, as inflation hit a 39-year high. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) was up 6.8 percent compared to a year ago, while the core index excluding more volatile food and energy prices surged by 4.9 percent from November 2020 levels. Those were the highest readings since June 1982 and June 1991, respectively, fueling inflation fears that had long been downplayed.

When inflation spiked in the spring/early summer of this year, it was largely due to the so-called base effect, caused by the pandemic’s cooling effect on consumer prices a year earlier. At the onset of the pandemic, prices had taken a dive due to a sudden drop in consumer spending and fuel demand before slowly climbing back to their per-pandemic trajectory over the summer and fall. Due to that initial dip in consumer prices, year-over-year comparisons were always going to be exaggerated this year, as last year’s prices were unnaturally low.

So are inflation fears justified or is it still too early to ring the alarm bells? Back in April, the Federal Open Market Committee said that it was going to aim for “inflation moderately above 2 percent for some time” before raising interest rates to achieve a long-term average of 2 percent inflation. And while it’s unclear how the committee defines “moderately above” and “for some time”, its long-term goal of 2 percent inflation is clear.

To eliminate the short-term effects of the pandemic, we calculated the average annual inflation rate over a moving three-year period, yielding a curve that fluctuated around 2 percent for a long time, until it took off this summer. In November, the three-year average inflation rate climbed to 3.3 percent, indicating that the latest spike in consumer prices is more than just a statistical blip and should be taken seriously.

The past 18 months shaped a new normal, consumer behavior shifted, and many companies followed and went digital as a necessity to stay in business. COVID-19 led to an unparalleled and unforeseen surge in eCommerce.

In many eCommerce markets, the growth continues, despite the pandemic slowing down in more and more parts of the world. Our whitepaper provides a look at the current state of eCommerce, outlooks to 2025, and information on the world’s major market players:

• Details on current eCommerce growth
  • Forecasts for eCommerce markets
    • Details on developments in different eCommerce segments
      • Comprehensive information on key players worldwide

Download this whitepaper at:

https://www.statista.com/page/ecommerce-2021-p

Digital sales are growing at a similar rate in Asia and the United States. But while the U.S. is about following the global average of digital media sales, Asia is already ahead of the curve and will reach a majority of digital media sales from 2022 onwards.

With a sales share of currently only 27 percent, the media landscape in Europe lags behind when it comes to monetizing online content. Until 2025, that number is expected to rise by only 8 percentage points to 35 percent.

The media segments taken into account for the graphic are TV and video, music, radio and podcasts, games, newspapers and magazines as well as books.

DESCRIPTION

This chart shows the estimated share of digital products in all media revenue in different regions/countries (in percent).

Research from Statista.com

https://www.statista.com/chart/22377/global-consumer-spending-on-leading-app-stores/

Google and Apple are thriving in the App Marketplace and making a killing from the App developer community.

Data Journalist Felix Richter says that “Faced with antitrust allegations and the wrath of (some) app makers, Apple extended an olive branch to its developer community in November by introducing the App Store Small Business Program, which reduces the company’s app store commission from 30 to 15 percent for developers earning less than $1 million a year.

Ever since the App Store was launched in 2008, Apple has taken a 30-percent cut on app sales, in-app purchases of digital content and subscriptions made via iOS apps (the latter dropping to 15 percent after the first year), which has lately drawn the attention of competition watch dogs, especially in cases where Apple competes with third-party app makers (e.g. Apple Music vs. Spotify).

While Apple’s decision to cut its commission in half for small developers looks like a big concession to make, data suggests that developers eligible for the program only account for a small fraction of App Store revenue. The following chart explains why Apple is fighting so hard to protect its slice of the app store pie. According to estimates from app analytics firm SensorTower, App Store revenue amounted to more than $70 billion last year. Assuming most of that total qualifies for Apple’s commission, that amounts to roughly $20 billion in revenue last year alone, which even for Apple is no small change.”

As the world focuses on what’s next after COVID-19, it’s time to focus on supporting your local branches, agents and partners with content and campaigns tailored to the local communities that they serve. Now more than ever local connections will define how your brand is perceived in the market. 

Join us in June 25th at 10:00 AM

Webinar registration:

Summary

As we begin to prepare for a post-COVID-19 world, it’s time to focus on supporting your local branches, agents and partners as they reach out to their local communities. Now more than ever, local connections will define how your brand is perceived in the market. To be successful, your team needs content and campaigns that can be quickly localized and personalized.

How do financial services firms and insurance companies create all of this content at scale? How can corporate offices empower local offices and agents to more easily serve their communities with relevant and time-sensitive material?

In this webinar, we’ll discuss top industry use cases, common problems and provide guidance on:

• Designing campaigns for local execution that take the pain out of planning and executing 
• Building customizable templates for local offices and agents that make personalization and localization simple and fast
• Maintaining corporate governance and brand control with access control
• Creating powerful roll-up reporting for ROI-driven decision making.

Speakers

Gary Ritkes
President and Managing Partner
Sproutloud

Gary Ritkes, managing partner and president of SproutLoud, oversees all business development and marketing. He has been a pioneer in the emerging vertical of Distributed Marketing technology and innovator in graphic communications and marketing strategy. Prior to joining SproutLoud, Gary was vice president of marketing for Rex Three, Inc.

He has served many Fortune 1000 clients and worldwide advertising agencies in providing marketing technology direction and optimization. He was an original founder of U.S.-based Earth Color Group and a co-founder of Advanced Digital Services (ADS). Gary has served as a board member for the local chapter of the American Advertising Federation, and for other national industry associations, including the DMA and AGA.

Warren Raisch
Director of Financial Services Strategic Accounts
Acoustic

For the past 20 plus years Warren has worked as a senior executive of leading high-tech firms including IBM, Apple, Adobe & HP divisions as well as global leaders in digital marketing and advertising industry including WPP and Publicis agencies. Warren has been working with some of the largest financial services firms and insurance clients to develop transformative marketing & advertising strategies and platforms.

Warren is a top selling published author with McGraw-Hill Publishing with his Book “The eMarketplace” and is an adjunct professor at The University of California. Warren has set up global operations across 190 countries and has lived on four continents.

Jeff Maney
Director, Distributed Marketing
Acoustic

For the past 20 plus years Jeff has been in the technology area having held leadership positions in product management, services and marketing at IBM, NCR and Silverpop. He has been working in Marketing Technology for the past 7 years responsible for offering management, implementation services and product go-to-market. 

Jeff has extensive expertise in product management and positioning, managing large teams and building partnerships. He has a bachelor’s degree in MIS from University of Georgia and MBA in Marketing from Georgia State University.